


All Aboard the Space RV

by AssoverTeakettle



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Family Feels, Other, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-13
Updated: 2017-02-13
Packaged: 2018-09-24 02:31:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9695762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AssoverTeakettle/pseuds/AssoverTeakettle
Summary: In an alternate universe, human beings are a part of a galactic federation that stands between the Alternian Empress and universal domination. On a mission to sack Derse, Karkat finds a small human wriggler and sets out on a journey to reunite the kid with his family, come hell or high water. Or y'know possible adoption and lussus-hood.





	1. In Which Shit Goes Sideways

It’s apparently a universal constant to refer to the first line of infantry in a battle as the ‘forlorn hope’. Because, newsflash people, if you’re a part of that line of sad fuckers running for the enemy line you are more than likely not going to be in any line for very long. Only one thing first row seats are going to get you in this theater, a hopefully quick end to your miserably wasted life. 

Cheers!

Fucking war. 

Like putting most of the known universe to heel wasn’t enough for most people, no, now let’s go challenge the only other alien power we know about in a few thousand parsecs. 

The hangar is full of the forlorn hope for this particular planetoid. Actually it’s a moon. It’s a small purple moon orbiting some lifeless planet that’s been colonized by the Empire’s only acknowledged threat, The United Galactic Federation. Made up primarily of a species of hornless, hemocasteless humans. 

The sergeants for this particular unlucky bunch of pustules on the ass-end of the universe march down the rows of soldiers. They slam shoulders and yank horns. Teeth bared against dark skin, flushed with adrenaline and the customary anger that’s a prerequisite for the job. 

A couple yellow-blooded sergeants step out of their usual beaten path to jostle one of the smaller recruits. Where his comrades have battlesuits in sleek black with streaks of color that glow the color of their blood, rust, orange, or yellow, with maybe the occasional olive thrown in, his suit is all black with gray piping. Non-commital and boring, the kind of thing the conscientious objectors to the hemocaste system wear. Boring except for the places where the suits been torn open by claws and various strife specibus. In those long ragged rents the white underside of the suit is stained a vivid scarlet that burns afterimages into the retina.

It’s a color that will not be forgotten. 

He doesn’t have much in the horns department either, tiny nubs that hardly clear his helmet are all that are visible. They don’t give purchase and they aren’t good handlebars. The sergeants settle for shoving him more than the others and snarling behind their teeth and if the suit is a little more worn after they pass by, then whatever, no big deal. 

Fucking nooklickers. 

They head to their specific part of the squad and bark out orders. The hangar door ahead of them opens up. The air from the moon at this altitude is hot enough to feel like their home, Alternia. That is, before they drop through the cloud layer. 

The towering gothic spires and sleek skyscrapers in purple and indigo are everywhere on the moon, a sprawling mess of a metropolis. Too bad for these poor fuckers. Tall towers of windows and spires of stone are super fucking easy to blow to bits when attacked from the air. 

So obviously let’s make the nice city a parking lot. 

The troll in the ragged suit grits his teeth as the hangar jets open fire. Purple masonry on an ancient church explodes into dust and hot ash. The propulsion system sucks some of the debris back into the hangars and he can taste the hot stone in his mouth. Stale and heavy on his tongue.

The entire line of ships opens fire on the skyline. Opening up the ground space for their cargos of infantry, ready and willing to be sacrificed for the mighty Alternian Empire. Yee fucking haw.

The soldier can’t hear the screams from where he stands, in line behind 20 others and still several thousand feet in the air but he can feel it in his gut. This is a civilian planet. A colony. It’s not even mostly humans that live here. It’s a carapacian planet, firm neutrals in galactic conquest, the only value the moon represents is as a foothold between space stations. Fucking hell. 

The next few minutes are a mess of bombing and slag and burning purple dust rushing around them. He can feel his ears pop, his jaw clenches with the acceleration. He loosens his knees, dropping his hips and BAM! They hit ground zero and his whole body shivers with the impact. 

His experience helped him to stand through the jarring landing. Half of the others in the troop fall on their unsuspecting asses.

In seconds they’re out. The Forlorn Hope is running pell-mell through the streets they’re only orders to kill or be killed. Those desperate to live or desperate for glory are out in the thick of it, killing carapacians left and right with the occasional human they find. Not like the victim fucking matters in war, now does it.

He’s still at the back of the line, covering his own mutant ass, from possible enemy fire and for sure friendly fire. Jumping like a long-eared squeakbeast from patch to patch of shelter he avoids an instant cull by staying in the rear of the invading force. Head stuck on repeat thinking: This is a fucking colony. Why the fuck was this attack even authorized?!

This is war. Its war war war war war. All is fair in war.

As it rages around him he thinks vaguely that he’s luckier than most of these noobs dying and fighting around him. He’s been in combat for years before things went south. Before his secret got out.   
These kids are just realizing that it’s not anything like the movies. It’s not a carefully blurred and cropped film, everything is in crystal detail against a backdrop of purple. It’s not all artistically smoothed together into a neat bundle of metaphor and allegory with somber or dramatic music. And it sure as hell doesn’t show any love to overcome the violence and the hate. It’s a lot of limp and stiffening corpses lining roads and a lot of blood that you can smell like hot tar in the back of your throat. 

The carapacians have red blood too and occasionally it spills from the pale throats of a human or two. But for the most part it makes no difference. The landscapes a jumbled mess of outstretched hands and missing parts; a pink wrist, a twisted leg, a crushed torso. 

In one alley a soldier is pushing their sword into one of the few human bodies over and over again. Choosing a different orifice every time. In another alley several soldiers are howling triumphantly and burning a few carapacians. Not dead carapacians. The alley is full of lamed and cornered creatures being cooked alive in their own carapaces. Now their own steaming blistering coffins. 

By the time two hours have passed the mutant has kneeled in the streets and thrown up everything but his intestinal track several times. His red mixing with the red that drips down every street now.  
He’s been running for forever, now in the aftermath he walks, but inside he’s still running. 

Up ahead one of the buildings they bombed into slag on the invasion run lies overturned, blasted and cracked open. It’s like looking at one of the hives back home, the tall sky-bound ones. It’s a long undulating mess of purple masonry with odd colors oozing out in the shape of rooms wherever the structure broke open, spilling its innards. Looters are crawling over it like ants on a corpse, picking the spine for any last minute remains. Any overlooked small tender bit left uneaten.

Most of the looters hop off to better pickings, using the wreckage as a parkour course. Some are howling like barkbeasts who got the bone, others are snarling like angry meowbeasts that missed the canary. They shamble to the west following the setting red sun, following the rise of the dead neighboring planet beginning to loom on the moon’s horizon.   
There’s only a small handful of olive and orange bloods nearby when he hears it. A small shrill cry of pain. 

Red ochre horns snap up, yellow eyes glitter and they all hone in on one broken block of hive halfway up the ruined structure. The soldier in the shredded uniform holds his breath as the rabble near him leap up towards where the sound came from; hunters intent on the chase. Whatever cried out is silent now, and the silence presses in on his eardrums worse than the earlier melee in the streets.   
It’s the excited victorious crow of one of those fucking carrion and a shrill scream of defiance and terror that ignites his fury.

It’s a tiny cell of a room in the hive, walls covered in sideways posters and crushed belongings every-fucking-where that surrounds him at the top. Two orangebloods are already bleeding out on the business ends of his sickles. One more orangeblood stands frozen in shock staring at him over her shoulder while the two olive bloods circle up on something small they’ve cornered in a side room. The door low and long now that it’s permanently on its side. He can hear their shod feet slipping on broken tiles.

He doesn’t quite remember this orangebloods face, or what her horns looked like later, he does remember the smooth slide of his sickle into the soft wet parts of her thorax. A clean cut that curves up under her ribcage and pierces all the way to her spine and heart. That’s the beauty of a motherfucking sickle. Bitch’ll cut a swathe of destruction for small movement investment.   
She just slides off the blade as he lowers his arm and it’s the work of a moment to use his momentum from the lunge to roll into the side block. 

It’s an ablution block from what he can see in the gloom. Sideways like the rest of it and a mess of crushed tile, dust, and stale shit-water that’s come back up through every pipe in the place. He gets the swift impression of a small, pale something over by the toilet and that’s it. A quick slip and slide and he cuts one olivebloods legs out from under them. Tendons snicked through and body falling like a puppet with cut strings. An almost lazy twirl of his wrist when their body hits his level and their throat is cut to the back of their breathing tube, rings of bone and green muscle flexing and spurting lukewarm blood on one side of his suit. 

The second fucker has just enough time to turn. One hand holding whatever it is by the scruff the other raised in a shit defense before he draws a neat x across their stomach. Whoops, there go their guts. He does the same drill as he did to their comrade, killing them when they hit the ground and snatching the live blade out of their twitching hands lest they manage to do damage in their death throes.   
He doesn’t straighten out of his crouch yet, elbows and knees cocked, head tilted to the side. He can feel his pulse pounding behind his eyes now in the wake of the adrenaline and bloodlust. The walls feel too close and he can tell he’s breathing too fast. 

Huddled against the wall where the olive fuck dropped it is the small bundle. Not a bundle, a wriggler. A human wriggler. A wriggler pale as humans can get with even paler hair and the biggest, reddest eyes he’s ever seen. Well fuck.

Suddenly the thrill in the soldiers he just slaughtered makes so much more sense than it did a minute ago. 

The wriggler’s curled up in a crouch in the lee of the toilet. He scurried there in the time it took his mutant rescuer to get a good look. Those big red eyes show the sclera all the way around, everything too pale, too fucking pale, and too fucking red. One tiny arm hangs in an awkward cradle against his chest; like a baby feather-beast with a broken wing. In his other hand is the broken off hilt and a hand and a half of a blade that’s way too fucking big for him. 

He wonders where the rest of it went. 

Slowly he kneels in the ruined ablution block and captchalogues his sickles. He doesn’t bother with the trite widespread arms that supposedly broadcast ‘no threat’. Yeah, him with clawed arms outstretched would totally ping “no threat” to the little broken featherbeast. Ha ha, yeah fucking right. Instead he curves his clawed fingertips in towards his palms and rests them gently on his knees. He doesn’t bother with anything else, doesn’t say anything just sits and watches the grub shivering by his hive’s load gaper.

Fifteen minutes later and his knees are sore, the kids still holding that stump of a sword out, and he’s regretting his life choices. Impatient and trying to squirm out of the pins and needles he can feel swarming from the knees down he shifts one leg forward, resting his weight on the ball of his forward foot. The change is subtle, his center of gravity barely moves but the kid’s observant and something in the movement translates to ‘stance shift=predator lunge engaged’.

The kid goes from wary mute in the corner to desperate alley rat. It’s only quick reflexes and years of experience that allow the mutant to eel to the side and wrap the wriggler in a headlock. Captchaloging the broken blade. 

The wriggler’s silent in his hold but thrashes like a fish on a hook. Kid totally disregards the broken limb in favor of all-out fight and his alien custodian is grudgingly impressed.   
His alien captor/ rescuer hauls the squirming wriggler out to the main block. In the fading light of the moon’s red sunset he can see the wriggler’s face screwed up in pain and lips bleeding where he’s torn them trying to keep quiet. He wonders how long the squirt has had a broken arm. Or for that matter how the wriggler survived the buildings collapse in the first place. 

Wriggler under one arm the mutant soldier that was supposed to be cull-bait today, officially labels himself a deserter. He proceeds to stomp over to an overturned sofa that’s resting cock-eyed on the remains of a long counter top. It was a black futon once with metal support struts that are bent and twisted out of shape and looks like a helix rocking chair with a futon side arm now. One end hangs off the island and hovers over empty space, the other points to the ceiling, balanced like a seesaw. The granite nutrition slab is more of a half-wall now in the sideways nutrition block but it’ll do as a defensive blockade. 

The deserter tightens his hold around his squirming grub and gives the edge of the couch a sharp heave. It tumbles over the island and lands on the other side still cock-eyed and more broken and shitty than before. But at least now it’s not visible from the opening in the hive that looks like some giant took a bite out of the wall. 

He settles them both in the shadowed space behind the marble and granite nutrition slab. Wriggling until he’s made a decent nest for them both in the black cushions and twisted metal.   
The wriggler’s in his lap now and has finfuckingally stopped trying to shed his own skin to get away. He sits quivering with tension and probably acute pain in his rescuer’s lap instead. Not much of an improvement. 

The mutant digs a free hand into one of the remaining pockets on his slashed and stained-to-hell uniform. There are still a few protein bars stashed there and some meds. He pulls out a bar and bites off a huge chunk of brown synthetic something-or-other that hasn’t killed him yet and lowers it to the grubs line of vision, just a hands length in front of his small pale nub. 

The bony little wriggler jumps, startled and the deserter finds himself staring down into puzzled eyes as red as his own. Gently, he nudges his armored hand towards the wriggler’s chest, waving the protein bar. He lost his own helmet a long time ago and he frowns at the pale squishy lump of human he just murdered five allies for. 

The kid frowns back and they stare at one another for a long quiet moment. The deserter watches, equal parts fascinated and traitorously concerned as the little featherbeast starts to shovel things like fear, pain, and worry away. Watches as tiny locks and gears come up through too large eyes in a too small face, until all those little vulnerabilities are hidden away. 

The wriggler looks away, expression shuttered and sniffs the protein bar instead. One pink hand grabs the larger gray hand offering the shit excuse for food and holds it steady while he tries to gnaw off a chunk. The deserter almost smiles at the muffled growling noises as the human kills the protein bar to death. 

The bar’s hard to chew for a full adult troll with a trap of fully operational teeth. For a human wriggler with those nubby little smooth cresents it’s a full paying job. The kid’s first bite ends up taking him a full 10 minutes to work his mouth around and swallow. The wriggler feels his captors chest hitch with a laugh and he spares enough vitriol to glare at him.

Eating the protein bar on his own now like it’s a challenge that he can’t back down from, the kid’s distracted enough for him to examine his arm. It’s the left one and it looks from the angle like the forearm might be broken. The troll leans over, one arm still around the wriggler’s waist and grabs a handy piece of broken chair leg nearby. Not like anyone’s going to miss it now. 

He feels the kid jump and start to bolt in his lap at the noise. A soft crooning sound comes unbidden from his thorax and he can feel it vibrating through his ribs. The wriggler feels it too and pauses, halfway out of his lap, teetering. The croon kicks into a deeper register and he uses the hand still cinched around the wriggler’s waist to rub small circles into his side. 

The kid wobbles for a moment then falls back into his seat. A surprised oof escapes his almost expressionless face. 

The mutant sets the disembodied chair leg at his side and rests his hands on his knees, palms down. 

The wriggler looks up furtively. Bright red peeking through white eyelashes that seem ridiculously long. 

The croon subsides into a subtle and inconsistent motor hum. They can both feel it rattling like a shit motor. He clears his throat, this next bit is too important to fuck up with unrealized biological instincts. 

Raising one hand he points to his own bloodpusher, the center of his thorax, and enunciates in clear growling clicks, “Kahrrkeht.”

The furtiveness disappears and is replaced by a practiced blankness. He ignores how frustratingly annoying that is when trying to communicate with no shared language. The troll huffs impatiently and repeats it, pointing emphatically to his own chest, “Kahrrkeht.”

He turns his hand and taps the wriggler’s nub gently with one claw. He raises his eyebrows and lets some glare leak through. 

The kid says nothing for a moment then points to himself and says something with too many soft sounds oozing together, “Dave.”

The alien grimaces and tries to wrap his teeth and tongue around the name, “Dehva.”

The kid’s nub wrinkles a little, like he wants to smirk but won’t. He shakes his head, universal enough, “No, Dave.”

He frowns at the kid, “Dehv.”

Dave snorts, and his shoulders hitch, “Kay, whatever.” He points to himself, “Dave” then to his gray bony chair with the stuttering motor, “Karkat.”

His alien sitter leans back a bit and groans in distaste. He tries one more time and attempts to ignore the ever present smirk on the wriggler’s face, “Kahrrkeht.”

The grub nods sagely and repeats the same too open, too clear vowels of before, “Yep. KARkat.” 

Little fucker put emphasis in there too. Fuck dammit. 

Karkat narrows his eyes as he leans back and they stare at one another again. This time there’s a lot less wariness from both. The tiniest uptick in the corner of Dave’s mouth makes Karkat feel uncomfortably as though he is on the losing side in a significant battle. But that tiny smirk is so much better than the stonewall from before. So he supposes he’ll let the wriggler be smug. Just for now.  
Apparently a protein bar and name sharing unstops whatever verbal blockage the kid had earlier. Now the pale little shit won’t shut up. He starts repeating Karkat’s grub name like it’s the lyrics to his new favorite song, adding variations and soft disgusting vowels wherever he seems to please. 

“Karkat. Karkity. Karkles. Karcrabby. Karkat.”

Some of the sounds sound suspiciously cutesy. Like something his sweepmate Nepeta would have used for her meowbeasts. Even when the kid is saying just his wriggler name it sounds more lyrical than it ever has in Alternian. There’s odd lilting harmony to the human speech. It comes through in the vowels and especially the stressed and unstressed syllables. The emphasis creates an odd hop-skip feeling that makes the language sound whimsical and harmless compared to the grating clicks and growls of Alternia’s speech.

Karkat decides in that moment that humans are the weakest, softest, palest bundles of shit the galaxy has ever seen and how in all holy hells of festering hoofbeast shit have they survived this long?!  
The kid seems to notice his silence and shuts up abrubtly. Teeth clicking as his jaw snaps shut. Karkat blinks and narrows his eyes. The wriggler’s ignoring him now, eyes pointed fixedly at some point ahead of them. Karkat tries to follow his gaze and ends up staring at the both of them in the reflection of the stove door across from them. 

Funny, in the dark surface of the door there aren’t any really distinguishable colors. Their silouhettes are just that, silouhettes. 

Karkat shifts his weight and gently nudges Dave with one hand. When the wriggler looks back up at him Karkat finds it in himself to grimace at the kid in what he hopes is an encouraging and not terrifying manner and pokes his injured arm gently. 

He grabs the broken chair leg and holds it against his own left forearm. He mimes a splint and watches as the kids face goes from I fucked up to, he’s trying to tell me something, and finally reaches destination of oh, needs to fix my arm.

Message sent and received Karkat unwraps the rest of the godforsaken protein bar and hands it to the kid. Dave sits quietly and eats while Karkat wraps him up and sets the bones to the makeshift splint.  
Ten minutes later Dave’s knocked out and snoozing like a champ in Karkat’s sore arms. There may or may not have been a sleep drug in that last protein bar. 

Dave seems comfortable enough in his lap, head tilted back against his thorax. Karkat lets himself ease back into the ruined futon cushions behind his back. He can’t sleep. Not tonight. He’s got a duty to the smug little ass-licker that he chose over five of his own. He’s not going to let anything more happen to this one misplaced soul. 

The night watch goes by slowly but peacefully enough. With the cool air of a Derse night sighing into the broken remains of the hive and the warm body of the wriggler in his arms.


	2. It's Better to Adopt in Pairs

It’s almost an hour past what passes for sunrise here on Derse by the time Dave starts to wake up. Quiet snuffling and muffled whimpers alerting Karkat that his charge is starting to join the land of the living again. The sudden silence and suspiciously wet gulps sound like tears being choked down and the poker face going on. 

By the time Karkat turns around the kid’s looking surprisingly alright for having been one of the few surviving victims of an invasion the day before. Karkat holds up two more protein bars in the pale morning light coming in through the broken opening. His grimace matches daves as he tosses one of them to the kid.

Oh well. Bottoms up.

Dave eats in silence sitting in the broken nest of futon and watches while Karkat gathers up some odds and ends.

He’s already disposed of the bodies from the other day in one of the still accessible blocks that looked unused for the most part. The sleeping platform a lump of stiff mattress shoved in a corner and the rest of the block a veritable dump of robotic circuits, wires, and boards mixed with the frankly disturbing paraphernalia that looks like Equius has visited recently. The five bodies weren’t that much of a change and frankly served to cover some of the more disturbing plushies and horse parts from the eye. 

Karkat had left as quickly as possible after that, pausing only long enough to strip an orange blood of similar build of their suit and trading it for his own. 

The assholes hadn’t had anything else of much use, just a few more protein bars, meds and med kits, and a short barreled pistol from one.

The rest Karkat had gladly consigned to its pony robot tomb and left it at that. 

After that unpleasant task Karkat had resumed his mad scurry around the overturned hive with a backpack, rooting through cabinets for anything useful to stuff inside. It’s about the time when he opens the door to the nutrition preserver and squawks at the avalanche of swords that fall out when Dave manages to cram down the last of breakfast and wander over.

The kid stares at the alien buried in shitty refrigerated swords and raises his brows, “What are you looking for?”

Karkat frowns at him, bright eyes glowering. He replies and it’s a long series of angry sounding growling clicks and rumbling crackles that make no sense to him whatsoever. 

Karkat trails off in his angry tirade after a while and they stare at each other. We’re going to have this staring thing down to an Olympic sport by the end of this, Dave thinks. 

In a blink Karkat rolls to his feet and kicks away the worst of the sword debris returning to check every inch of the fridge with considerably more caution now. And finds it to be distressingly bare of anything that can actually be put in a nutrition sac and be nutritious. Any food items that were put in there by mistake have been there so long that they’ve probably begun their own sentient culture amongst frozen plateaus of plastic. Karkat makes the mistake of trying to sniff something out and gets a snout full of something fungal that is probably the high priest of the fridge mold. 

He reels back eyes rolling in his head for a moment before he snorts and slams the door shut. He turns to the mess of live blades on the floor and Dave can hear from ten feet away the low rumbling clicking and snarling as the alien starts rooting around in the cabinets now. 

Five more minutes of apartment searching and with Dave’s help Karkat manages to stock up on five containers of microwavable mac and cheese, some ramen packets, and what might be jello mix if they’re lucky. Eurgh. 

Everything useful’s stuffed in the backpack and they’re almost ready to move out. When Karkat pauses and stares at Dave again. Dave wants to squirm and look away but bro taught him better than that so he doesn’t. He stares back. 

Karkat disappears past him and walks into bro’s room like its nothing.

Karkat hears Dave squeak something at him and tiny feet chase him down the hall. Shit. Last thing he wants is for the kid to see the dead soldiers stashed in the respite block he doesn’t seem to want him in. Karkat forces the clinging, protesting wriggler off of his leg and manages to squirm into the block, locking it behind him.

It only takes him a few minutes and would take him fewer if he weren’t half listening to the protesting voice at the door and the desperate grabbing at the door handle. He drags a hoodie out of an unused corner and finds an old husktop that he had overlooked earlier. 

Karkat hovers by the door waiting for a lull in the pounding and yelling. When it comes he slinks out like the snake that won the creeper award and manages to plug the doorway with his body when the Dave human tries to get past him and into the other room. It’s like trying to force out a determined meowbeast and ends with both of them standing stiff and ruffled in the hallway panting at one another.  
Dave’s as voiciferous as Karkat himself is and deep down he’s impressed by how much the human wriggler has to yell at him. Needless to say he doesn’t understand a word of it any more than Dave’s understood him earlier but he gets the feeling of the verbal beat-down. 

Karkat’s not sure what he did besides being an alien, kidnapping the kid, and forcing him to eat protein bars that made the wriggler such a spitfire. All that on his record and it’s a side trip into the Netherlands of disturbing pony tombs and robot parts that makes the kid flip his lid. It is also the most expression he’s seen on Dave’s face since they’ve met. Hmm.

Dave's a huffing red-faced featherbeast on the other side of the hall. He’s backed himself into a corner and his cheeks are puffed out and his hairs an unholy mess. 

Karkat’s not much better. He can feel the tell-tale heat in his own face and the hairs prickling on his neck are probably puffed out defensively. They stand there huffing and dead silent with the planet sized portions of angry and awkward flying around at high velocity speeds.

Karkat shakes the hoodie at Dave and avoids eye contact. 

Dave stares at him and snatches the hoodie angrily. He shoves his arms through the sleeves, his little hands so far back that he has to shake them so the fabric pools at his shoulders long enough to zip it up the front. Even zipped the thing looks like its hanging onto his narrow shoulders through the heat of his anger alone and the mysteries of marshmallow poofiness. Dave glares at him and marches over to snatch the pilfered husktop away too, chirping angrily up at Karkat. 

With Dave clutching the husktop to his chest through layers of marshmallow soft hoodie Karkat scoops him up and walks down the hallway to the main room, ignoring the last minute tirades against uncool aliens creeping in big bro’s stuff. 

The sun is higher in the Derse sky and Karkat can hear the general sounds of a recently destroyed city waking up. The sound of soldiers going about their business further off and the sound of survivors moving rubble to uncover the living and bury the dead everywhere. 

In the main block he stops just long enough to pull on the backpack and strap on the pistol to where he can access it on his right thigh, even when carrying Dave. He pauses and makes one last turn of the room, checking the corners. 

Dave is quiet and as they turn to leave through the broken wall he puts his unbroken arm on Karkat’s shoulder and tugs. Karkat turns his head and looks at him and in the light from the opening Dave’s bone-white and seems more fragile than before. 

Dave looks around at the gutted remnants of his hive and swallows. Karkat can see a sheen of water leaking from the wriggler’s eyes that he blinks away. Only a couple escape and make silver tracks down his face. Dave wipes them away hurriedly in his elbow. Karkat pauses on the threshold and lets that subconscious rumble rise in his chest like a tide. Dave hears it and sniffs hard, nuzzling into the space by his collarbones. 

Karkat grips his charge tighter and together they brave the streets of Derse. 

It’s not too bad at first. In the immediate area around Dave’s broken hive there’s a lot of purple rubble and empty streets with empty houses. It’s disturbing yes, but not overly upsetting as Karkat knows the rest of the city will be. 

It isn’t long until Karkat realizes how badly Dave’s head needs to be covered. The wriggler’s pale hair is lusus pale and catches the twilight sunlight of Derse like a beacon. Karkat flips the overlarge hood up, shadowing Dave’s face completely and pulls the sleeves over his small hands, hiding the tell-tale soft pink skin. Talkative as Karkat knows Dave can be he’s silent now. Kid’s smart. He knows what’s up and he doesn’t make any fuss as Karkat picks his way over rubble and through broken doorways. Slinking through choice alleys and avoiding the sound of soldiers stomping along in orderly lines or the survivors weeping in corners. 

Eventually Karkat gives up on wandering alleys in the hope of stumbling somewhere better and climbs up a series of fire escapes, drainpipes and laundry lines that miraculously escaped notice. By the time he’s on a flat rooftop with Dave peering out from his hoodie cave the suns past midday. Looking out to the horizon he looks for anything that could indicate a space port or an area with spaceships yet unbombed. Though he doesn’t hold out much hope, tactically that would be the first place to take out after communications. Unless the fucknugget in charge of this pointless attack didn’t give a fucking damn who knew. 

When he spots the tower of the space port off to the south he nods. Yep, looks like not so much. Good to know an attack that thousands of cull-bait soldiers and millions of civilian non-combatants died in was just an advertisement in the grand scheme. Didn’t even take out transport or communications. 

He strangles the vicious snarl that tries to rip up through his throat and the rumbles stay in his chest. 

Dave gives him a look, half worried, half unimpressed and Karkat shrugs. They’re halfway to the space port and what is at this point a theoretical, deeply hoped for getaway vehicle when there are sounds of a scuffle down below their roofline.

Snarled Alternian has Karkat dropping like a stone to peer cautiously over the roofline at the commotion. Careful of Dave’s head he wraps his arms around him and tucks him underneath his chin as he leans over to look. There’s a tree in the way, standing half upright in a stone courtyard in one of the richer districts. Tied to said tree is a small figure in a purple dress whose slight twitching movements are the only clue Karkat gets that she’s still living. Dave stiffens where he’s wormed between Karkat and the wall to get a look for himself. He turns up to Karkat and hisses, “That’s Rose! You’ve gotta help her!”

Karkat winces and makes shooshing noises. 

Dave shakes his head vehemently and tugs repeatedly until he can talk directly into Karkat’s auricular spunges, “That’s Rose! She’s my friend you gotta help her!”

Karkat listens with half an ear and keeps his eyes glued on the courtyard below. A group of yellow and rusts are getting orders from an oliveblood. 

“See if there are any others in these big fancy houses. The more humans we make an example of the better for us when the empress notices. If we get enough maybe you’ll get a promotion,” The oliveblood snarls, “Get out there and find some more!”

They scatter to the stately manors on either side of the courtyard and up and down the nearby streets. 

Karkat waits until he can hear them breaking glass and wood to get inside before he lays down the backpack and pushes Dave to the side. He jumps down two floors to an awning over what was probably some ritzy café or barber shop and swings out to leap onto one of the higher branches of the tree the Rhoz human is tied to. 

The oliveblood’s head snaps around to stare at the awning he was at a second ago, nostrils wide and quivering. Karkat stays poised and still on the branch now directly to the oliveblood’s left. He can see the lines of a seargeant on her bicep and waits until she turns away, relaxing her guard. 

He drops down between her and the human landing on the balls of his feet. He’s almost completely silent but she must hear something or feels the air move as he drops because as he straightens, sickles in hand she whirls and he’s fighting off six feet of tall angry oliveblood seargeant. 

They dance around each other neither landing more than a quick stinging cut. 

She rolls to a crouch and comes up throwing sand. Karkat hisses and blocks most of it but not before she comes up swinging. She swipes at his eye and he leans back the blow slicing across his cheek.  
He can feel the hot flame-like blood slicking his cheek in seconds. Soaking through his collar and further down. Her eyes widen and narrow into slits and she snarls. Karkat can hear the soldiers from before finishing up in their various homes. Calling back and forth to one another as they head back to the square. His heart is in his throat and his blood is dripping down his face. She’s too good to finish quickly when he’s tired and injured as it is. He’s going to get caught, caught and culled and he feels one instant of intense relief that he left Dave up on the rooftop.

That is until five containers of instant macaroni and two cups of ramen fall from the sky and rain down on his adversaries head. One of the ramen packets gets skewered on a hook horn. Her eyes widen and the surprise is enough that Karkat uses his sudden surge of fear to dart forward and rip her throat out. 

He dodges back to avoid the spurt of blood and races to the human wriggler tied to the tree. She’s waking up in a fuzzy state between aware and not. Oddly pale purple eyes blinking up at him as he cuts the ropes and lifts her as quickly and gently as he can. She’s still too still to be reassuring but he counts it as a blessing as he throws her over one shoulder and scales up the tree to leap at the building.  
By the time he pulls himself over the rooftop ledge the soldiers just round the corner to see their seargeant still bleeding out on the pavement and no human wriggler to be found. 

Karkat stuffs the viciously satisfied rumble and instead lays her out lengthwise on the roof. Dave is right at his elbow and reaches for her head, cradling her carefully with Karkat until she’s lying prone. She blinks a few times, eyes unfocused and manages a puzzled smile at Dave before she’s unconscious again.

Looks like the fuckers caught her last night or early this morning. She’s got a collection of bruises and cuts spread out liberally on her arms and legs with several head wounds. They leave him in no doubt of what those soldiers were doing for amusement. Kicking wrigglers around for fun. 

He turns angrily to grab the back pack and search for the med kit he stuffed somewhere in there to stop short at Dave’s expression. The kid is so pale he’s almost gray and he stares at her like he can’t believe what’s happening. 

Karkat reaches over and bops him on the nose. A sharp bark morfs into an unimpressed growl. What? You just gonna break down or you gonna help? Dave jerks but bites back any indignant protest he might have made and looks over at the snappy alien. Karkat hands him the med kit and grabs the bandages out of it, leaving it sitting in the kids lap. 

They patch Rose up quickly. Enough so that she won’t wake up in more pain than she has too and pack up. 

Karkat shoulders her as best he can and before he can say anything Dave’s shrugged the backpack onto his own narrow shoulders and is standing at attention. Ready to go.

Karkat nods back at him and the rest of their journey to the space port is full of stops and starts as they climb fire escapes, cross rooftops and jump alleys. 

*****

There's a white-hot pain stabbing into the thick muscle of his thigh and it’s all he can do not to howl. Karkat slaps a hand against the offender and finds himself crushing a tiny human hand that’s got a white-knuckled grip on a foot long needle she just stabbed him in the thigh with. A strangled cry gets caught in his throat and comes out a thin aggravated whine, “The fuck?!” He hisses.

Rose stares at him and her odd eyes are half-lidded and colder than a wrigglers should be. She doesn’t seem quite awake but she’s sure as hell not unconscious anymore. 

Karkat can feel the muscle twitching rapidly around the still stabbing needle and it hurts! He tightens his grip on her steely hand and slowly pulls it out of his leg. Dave's next to them now and is helping him. He’s grabbing Rose’s hands and pulling her away talking a mile a minute. Somewhere in there Karkat hears his name repeated several times. 

When it finally pulls free of the muscle he can’t stop the groan that swells in his throat and chokes him for a minute. He finally feels her loosen her grip on her weapon and he lets her hand go immediately trying to staunch the blood flow pouring out of his leg and down into his boot. 

“Gog fucking dammit!” Shit that stings!

From further down the hangar there are shouts and the sound of running feet. Karkat rips his eyes open and turns grabbing the two wrigglers mid- argument by their scruffs and limps the three steps to the walkway to toss them bodily up the ramp. 

They thud to the floor on the inside of the space ship and he ignores them for the moment to turn, pistol in hand to lower some heads. 

The shots are terribly wide, nowhere near any actual damage to targets but they do encourage the troops to hit the ground. Karkat decides he’ll be flattered later by the alacrity of their floor diving and empties the pistols rounds as he backs up the ramp as quickly as his leg will allow. 

The kids are standing when he gets up the ramp and slams a fist into the lock. The ramp rises and the struts underneath the ship start pushing up, leveling her. Karkat hobbles like a pro past them to the pilots chair in the prow of the ship.

He throws himself into the pilots chair and flips switches as fast as he can. The hum of the engines whines throughout the hull as it tries to keep up. Instruments light up and the computer starts compensating for his lack of a secondary pilot to help with start up. The engine light goes green just as the incompetent nooklickers of the universe start to close the hangar doors above them.

And thank fuck for giant ass hangar doors in a stupid ass location. The hangar opening is the size of half a football field and trying to shut a door of steel over that takes time. Karkat gives it the gas and they lift off zipping through the hangar roof as the metal paneling is only halfway closed, folding down like the petals of a large flower. 

Its way beyond too late to stop the little carapacian aircraft now. They’re off and leaving orbit in record time. With the fleet on the horizon and any destination as good as the next for now he punches in the coordinates for a neutral zone supplier and rest stop a few systems over and they achieve light speed. 

As the computer gives up the calculations for entering light speed, running over possible collisions and finding the safest course Rose comes up by his elbow. She looks a little more awake now and she’s holding a roll of what looks like bandages and some gauze patches. 

Karkat gives her a jaundiced look. 

She smiles apologetically and points to the still bleeding stab wound in his thigh. The pilots seat under him luckily is made of a synthetic leather of some kind so instead of soaking up red like a sponge its been pooling under his ass. Yay. 

Nothing quite like feeling like you’ve wet yourself and are on the tail end of a fucking massive sopor party. His head feels like he’s either stuffed 10 bags of woolbeast fur into the empty parts or that some mediterminator came and siphoned off whatever gray matter there was in his thinkpan.

Here, I know just the fix for your inescapable bouts of stupidity, fatal fuck-uppery, and any crippling attacks of guilt, insomnia or self-hatred! We’ll just take everything in your frontal think-pan cavity and suck it out through your thigh with a pint of blood! Instant cure-all!

Behind Rose, Dave nods at him encouragingly and it’s that more than his internal monologues that get him out of his funk enough to give Rose the go ahead. 

While Karkat fiddles with the controls and punches in the final route for their fuel up planet Rose presses gauze patches to the wound and wraps it in bandages. It leads to some awkward shifting and hip-lifting to free the thigh to where she can successfully wrap messy layers around it but they get the job done. By the end of it when Karkat looks, the bandage job makes it look like he stuck his thigh straight through a featherbeast nest and is wearing it like a garter. 

Kanaya would have a heart attack. 

He shrugs and gives Rose a nod. Not too shabby. 

He thinks he catches the faintest flush on those pale cheeks and a quick smile but a flashing computer screen drags his attention away. It turns out to be nothing, just the carapacian system welcoming the new pilot and passengers to the ship, typical. And thankfully the ship must have a scanner somewhere because the computer proceeds to convert files to Alternian and gives a brief run-down and tutorial option for most of the functions on board. This includes a pair of rings that allow instant translation between different species/ languages when programmed correctly. 

When the female voice of the computer relays this Karkat sags back into his chair with a groan of relief. He imagines for a moment that this is it he died in a puddle of his own blood in a pilots chair and this is heaven.

Halle-fuckin-lujah!

The set up the carapacian tech had been pretty easy in theory. There were two rings, each with 4 clear bulbs on them made of some sort of glass fibers. One person put on the ring and the ring would take a small sample of blood and analyze it until it identified the species and language appropriate for that bulge licker. No problem. The rings identitfied him in minutes and chose the wonderfully superior and simple tongue of Alternian. The ONE language that ALL trolls use.

The piece of shit ring technology had taken the drop of human blood offered by Rose’s pricked finger and analyzed it and proceeded to start spewing the same phrase in 30 some variations of the same species blisteringly stupidly complex language systems. Rose stopped the tech at the variation that Karkat’s ring had labeled, “Standard English” and that had been that. Though Rose had told Karkat later, more than a little smug, that human beings had nearly ? 200 languages all different from one another. 

“How the shitting fuck do you communicate with each other?! How do you get anything done if none of you can say a gog-damn word to each other and make sense?! That’s so blisteringly stupid I’ve just experienced 3rd degree pan-rot by proxy!”

Rose had just shrugged and Dave had replied, “It’s just more fun that way.” 

Karkat had also quickly discovered that he unwittingly signed up for all of the things he never wanted to sign up for. Ever. In the history of his regrettable existence on this dimensional life plane.

He had assumed ( like an idiot because what else is new?!) that once communication was established via the helpful carapacian technology that wrangling two human wrigglers would be easier not harder. 

Ha ha, fucking ha!

Without the threat of imminent cull by Alternian soldiers, and with the added aid of a functioning communication system with the alien that rescued/ kidnapped them the two wrigglers devolved from surprisingly resourceful grubs to two recalcitrant meowbeasts intent on messing with him.

Oh and did he mention that they were smart little smug meowbeasts?! Well they fucking were! Two smart-ass kids, communication, no immediate threat to life, and one alien ten horrorterror lengths out of his league and life on the small carapacian touring vessel just went from hopeful to someone please kill me.


End file.
